Blockade Diary

Lidiya Ginzburg

Though based on first-hand experience during the siege of Leningrad,
Blockade Diary is not actually a diary, or even a documentary novel.
It has no characters as such — just a generic N and K — and only
scattered fragments of dialogue, description, and narration of events.
What it offers is an analytical probing of the psychology of life
under siege.

Ginzburg explores the effects of cold, hunger, shelling, and the death
from starvation of family members. She explains the psychology of
queueing and rationing and the behaviour of intellectuals finding
new roles. Above all was the constant obsession with food.

"The siege cooking mania took hold of the most unlikely people.
Once I happened to observe a boy of 16 (the age of greatest
contempt for womens' affairs) frowning and biting his lip as he
baked some oatcakes. At once his mother came fussing around:
'Let me... you don't know how...' But without a word he pushed
her roughly away from the stove.

The more meagre the raw material involved, the closer it
approached mania. All the maniacal activity stemmed from a
single premise: just eating was too simple, left too little trace.
Siege cookery resembled art — it conferred tangibility on things.
Above all, every product had to cease being itself. People made
porridge out of bread and bread out of porridge; they made cakes
out of greens, and cutlets out of herrings. Elementary materials
were transformed into dishes. These efforts at cookery were
motivated by the thought that it was tastier or more filling
that way. But it wasn't that, it was the pleasure of fiddling
about, the enriching of the lingering, protracted process..."

"Blockade Diary" itself is only eighty pages long, and is followed in
this volume by some additional short pieces. "Notes Under Siege" turns
to political and existential philosophy, using the siege to explore the
relationship between the individual and the community or state, and the
anxieties of existence. "Paralysis" is a first person account of the
effects of malnutrition and starvation. And "Excerpts From a Siege Day"
goes through a day in the life of N.

"N did not immediately understand why every day at work, after
about one o'clock, he was possessed by a strange sense of malaise.
Then he realised what it was — urgency. This urgency was one of
the guises of starvation or starvation trauma. Urgency as a mask
for hunger — the ceaseless rush from one stage of eating to the
next, accompanied by the fear of missing something. This urgency
was particularly associated with lunch. This was given out by an
indifferent government agency. That is, it had objective criteria
for everything — this was certainly true and the criteria were
certainly objective. But what if it wasn't enough? Several times
during the winter there hadn't been enough porridge."

It's only a brief volume, but Blockade Diary is a powerful study of
human life under adversity, facing starvation in a regulated community.
It is evocative of Leningrad and its historical experience, but it is
universal in its reach.